5 Downright Evil Ways to Use Blogs For Profit

In my previous post I asked everyone if they made money blogging, and not surprisingly, majority of commenters replied in the negative.

The reason why many, or should I say most, people don’t make money from blogs is that most of the easy ways to effectively make money from blogging are considered somewhat bad, unethical, user-unfriendly and so on.

So bloggers who have worked hard to build a community around their blog, stay well away from money making practices that may harm their reputation and put off their readers. They happily choose the community over money.

I, too, fall in the same category of bloggers. I could run AdSense and plethora of other types of ads to monetize my blog, but I consider this to be bad from user experience perspective as well as an ineffective monetization strategy.

Ineffective? Sure, in my case, my readership consists mainly of bloggers and web masters who are pretty tech savvy and immune to advertisements. They either ignore the ads, or are turned off by them because they come here for information, not to see ads, especially when they can tell an ad from the real content.

So if you are one of the bloggers who don’t make money blogging, here’s good news for you. You don’t have to monetize your current established blog with evil ads to make money. There are other ways to make money from blogs. Some of these are really tough ones. For example, creating a product and selling it on your blog, or using your blog to promote your expertise a.k.a services.

The good news is that you don’t have to use any of the above methods to make money from blogs. Instead, take a look at the following ways.

Start a blog just for PayPerPost and text link ads

The problem with the easiest money making techniques like selling links and writing sponsored posts is twofold 1) your readers can smell a sponsored post from two miles’ distance, and they don’t really like it 2) you’re always in danger of getting penalized by Google for selling links.

However, you don’t have to endanger your established blog to make money with above mentioned services. What you got to do is: start one or more blogs just for writing sponsored posts and selling links. Trust me, there are countless marketers out there dying to buy links from you if you are willing to sell them.

To add content to your blog, you can post just about anything. Post news, excerpts from other blogs, or republish free articles (of course with proper credit and link to the original source). Once it has been indexed by search engines and is a few months old, you can start writing sponsored posts, selling links, and promoting affiliate products. Possibilities are endless.

Start as many as you want. Domains are cheap, and almost all major hosts allow multiple domain hosting.

Interlink your blogs to increase their pagerank

While you are at it, you can use all your new blogs to link to one another, and most importantly, link to your main sites and blogs. It never hurts to get an extra keyword rich link to your main site to boost its search engine rankings!

Do it with caution. Use different locations for links and different keywords in link text to avoid getting penalized by Google.

Create an aggregator blog for organic traffic and monetize it with AdSense

Whatever people may say about AdSense, it’s still a major player in advertisement industry. And it’s always been one of the biggest earners for me.

The problem with AdSense is that it’s difficult to optimize your content so you can get the most out of every click. You also got to have a lot of traffic to make more than a few pennies a day with AdSense.

Considering this, if you monetize a blog with AdSense, you need to have plenty of consistent traffic, and good amount of fresh content to keep the traffic coming.

Social media is not the answer to the problem of consistent traffic. Social media traffic comes in spurts, and is almost useless when your sole purpose is to get your visitors to click on your AdSense ads.

The answer is organic search traffic. Once search engines start sending you traffic, it invariably builds up, and rarely comes down. Organic traffic is the kind of traffic you should be aiming to get on your AdSense monetized blog.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t run any other ads that compete with AdSense, as it will not perform very well in the presence of competing ads, or sell links or sponsored posts as it will jeopardize your Google rankings.

Now to keep on churning out good content without scraping other blogs, this is where you have to do some research and find the proper niche.

The aggregator blog that I referred to in the heading is the blog that aggregates any and all information in a particular niche. Don’t confuse it with a scraper, as the content is written manually, proper credit is given, and the traffic is actually directed to the original source of information. Think of this blog as a forum where members post news articles with a link to the original source, and no attempt is made to take credit for the article.

For example, your blog could be about Windows Vista sidebar gadgets (here’s a free idea for you!) where you gather all new gadget downloads. What you do here is, copy/paste the widget description by the author, write the author’s name, and give a download link that points to the original widget page. Nothing wrong with that, right?

When choosing the niche for your aggregator blog, try to think outside the box. Don’t go for a usual all things tech blog. You won’t make a penny with that as it’s already an over-over-saturated niche. Go for a smaller niche where there’s less competition but plenty of information to gather.

Again, create as many as you want!

Use a blog + online shop + a forum combo

While blogs always attract more search engine traffic, blogs are not the only way to get good amount of traffic.

Forums, for example, not only grow quickly if you have a few active members, but also attract a lot of long tail search engine traffic. You can’t optimize a forum for a particular keyword, but over time, as the forum grows, you’ll notice that many threads rank top in SERPs for many frequently searched for terms.

Having a forum with your blog is a good way to add more fresh content to your site and get repeat visitors. You can link to your blog from forum threads, and promote your forum in blog posts and share the traffic between the two.

If your niche is such that your visitors are looking for, or are willing to buy something, then it’s not a bad idea to add an online shop to your blog.

Amazon and Chitika offer the publishers customizable online stores that can be integrated with your site. It’s a one-click way to quickly add an online store, but if you want full control over what you want to sell and how, you can manually create a store with your chosen affiliate products. You can get the product link, banners, etc. from Commission Junction.

Did I say start as m any as you want? You can also add more goodies to pimp up your site further!

Well, there’s one more evil way to make money from blogging.. and that is:

Start a make money online blog to loot your audience

Why not? Everyone and their grandpa has a make-money-online these days!

Seriously, that’s how John Chow, his pals, and his followers make money, so why not you! After all we are talking about evil ways to make money online, eh?

And for god’s sake, don’t start as many as you want. There are already too many of them!

So there we are. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible to do with blogs, but I’m sure once you apply all, or any, of above methods, your brain will be teeming with more of our own evil schemes!

I think there are a lot of like-minded people out there, mainly designers who are great bloggers, but just see their blog as a way of connecting with people and getting their name about. The problem that most people encounter is that making money from a blog rarely intersects with creating a good social blogging experience for visitors.

Thank you for your kind words Sue. I’m interested in knowing what part of the site title you didn’t like?

Home Based Business, thank you, and I hope you keep coming back.

Emily, exactly. I don’t see anything wrong with monetizing a blog in a non-intrusive way, but it still in some way takes away from overall user experience. However, the good thing is that when you build enough audience, you can profit from your blog and keep your readers happy at the same time. You can offer them something they really want and happily pay you for your offering. The “Teaching Sells” course of Copyblogger.com is one such example that comes to mind.

What a good article you have here. I especially like the 3rd idea because it is ethical. Some famous bloggers have been proposing other ways to go about that, and they aggressively state that their methods are the only right ones when it comes to MFA blogs. I’m so glad that a respectable blogger like you thinks differently.

I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible to do with blogs

Hey! Now I want a new article on the subject! You evil man… shouldn’t make your readers curious!

How am I doing? Very tired, but happy. I’m about to quit my day job, ohohohohohoho!!!

As for web projects, well, I’ll tell you more about them when the time comes (i. e., when it’s time to start the promotion/link building/social vote begging). All I can say right now is that I’ve been spending quite a few bucks buiyng domains. And I had to request a sort of upgrade to my webhost.

Ah, yes, I’ve been also writing for http://thewmblog.com , but that doesn’t mean that I won’t update my other blogs anymore. As soon as I quit my day job and organise my web life, I’ll get back to business in full force.

What about you? Any other projects besides this superb blog of yours? Have you been participating in any other forums besides the (dead?) Team Marketing? I miss those good old days…

I started doing paid posts some time ago and I lost my PR really fast. But I have to say that even if I lost my PR I am able to make money online. Your ideas are great, I am really interested in the online shop + forum idea.
Thanks for the tips!

Great post. Ads can make a site look yucky, but I think it can be done without hurting the user experience. We are all used to seeing ads now anyway.

I think what is most important is the content. If you are solving a problem for someone, especially a technical one, it doesn’t matter how many ads you have up, people are going to find you on google and read that info.

That said, I totally agree a tech savvy audience is likely to ignore the ads, but I am tech savvy myself, and I still catch myself occasionally clicking on google ads.